“I’ve seen a couple of Rick and Morty lines where I’m like: ‘Well jeez, I only meant that the character felt that way, I didn’t mean that you should wave that like a flag for a new nation and go start an army in a forest somewhere,’ but that’s really the consumer’s own business,” he says. These days, Harmon takes a more circumspect approach to such fans. “I loathe these people,” he said in 2017 of that particular brand of “fan” after they took offence to Harmon and Roiland adding more women to the writing team and started harassing the new writers online. Harmon has previously spoken out about his “disgust” for a toxic subset of the show’s audience who take Rick’s s harsh worldview out of context and use it to support their own beliefs. Still, not everyone has quite grasped the joke, and for some fans – the same people who are convinced “social justice warriors” and women are ruining everything they hold dear – Rick isn’t a nasty piece of work, but an alpha-male hero. “He’s more disobedient, which I think is a symptom of him seeing all these sides of Rick.” Harmon quickly stresses that that isn’t “a linear thing that will continue until finally Morty kills Rick in his sleep and the show’s over”. “Morty’s less afraid to demand things from Rick,” Roiland says. But in the show’s upcoming fourth season, he is beginning to push back. For the most part, poor old Morty has reacted to this litany of horrors with the same terror and disbelief.
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Over the course of the show, Rick has wiped Morty’s mind, trapped him in a series of Saw-like murder rooms and caused the separation of his parents. It is a relationship that, it’s fair to say, is far healthier than that of Rick and his grandson. Bar the odd squabble over “a tonal thing or a joke”, the pair have “never disagreed to any great extent over anything truly important,” Roiland says. Roiland and Harmon, speaking over the phone from LA, suggest that their working relationship is one of balance, creative integrity, and a good dose of taking the piss (“He’s grown very distant and cold,” Harmon jokes of Roiland). Acclaim and awards soon followed, notably an Emmy for outstanding animated programme, a hotly contested category in this classic era of adult animation. He thought of Roiland straight away, and the two of them set about making Roiland’s gross-out style more palatable to a wider viewership. Over the next few years, the two worked on their own projects – Harmon created fan-favourite sitcom Community, while Roiland became known as the voice of Lemongrab in cult kids’ cartoon Adventure Time – but were reunited when Adult Swim asked Harmon to make an animated show. The seeds for the show were planted in 2006 when Roiland presented his crudely drawn sketch The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti – a Back to the Future parody that was the precursor to Rick and Morty – at Harmon’s gonzo short film festival Channel 101. The credit for the show’s success can be laid squarely at the feet of co-creators Roiland and Dan Harmon, the former of whom also voices the two eponymous stars, although in reality his timbre is closer to long-suffering 13-year-old Morty than his sadistic grandpa.
The most popular comedy among US millennials when its third season launched in 2017 (ahead of both The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family), it has the clout not just to lay waste to branches of McDonald’s but to make or break bands just ask Blonde Redhead, whose song For the Damaged Coda was catapulted into the upper reaches of Billboard’s Hot Rock chart nearly two decades after its release due to an appearance on the show. Since its debut in 2013, Adult Swim’s seemingly niche cartoon has been obsessed over by everyone from Kanye West to its army of young fans.
Such is the strange power of Rick and Morty, one of the decade’s more unlikely success stories. It sold out immediately, and demand was so high in some branches that police had to be called out to deal with fans angrily chanting: “We want sauce.” McDonald’s, never ones to shy away from a publicity stunt, brought Roiland’s favourite condiment back for one day only in 2017. That man was Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty, and his love for the sauce was such a running joke in the writers’ room of the hit animated comedy that it made it into the show’s third season as a major plot point. Few noticed when the sauce was quietly discontinued soon after, but one man never gave up hope that it might return. Back in 1998, McDonald’s launched a limited-edition Szechuan dipping sauce to tie in with the release of Disney’s Mulan.
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